Most people selling or marketing into the enterprise IT space see the value in having a regular newsletter with valuable content sent to their key contacts. However they know how hard it is to produce a quality newsletter that their contacts will value.
It’s a build or buy choice and I can make that an easy ‘buy’ choice!
I can provide an individual with a turnkey, managed Enterprise IT Newsletter service for about $33/week. For a team of five, I provide additional features, a custom website, and up to 1000 contacts per rep for about $22/week per team member.
Those approximately 22 articles were the most clicked-on articles from the previous week’s newsletter that was sent to 50k+ subscribers of “IT News and Events“, which has been in production since 2011.
How to get started? Make a spreadsheet with up to 500 of your professional IT contacts who would find that newsletter useful.
Upload that spreadsheet into the service and use the system to send a welcome message (opt-in or opt-out) to your new subscribers.
Each week your subscribers will receive a tailored email from your email address with just the topics selected by that subscribers.
The newsletter will have a banner with your name, contact info, picture and logo.
There is great value in being the provider of useful information to your key contacts!
You can sign up as my subscriber and experience the newsletter as would one of your contacts. See this blog post.
We produce IT Newsletter for individual sales professionals (Reps), sales employees of certain major IT vendors and for teams of IT sales professionals.
Here is a table with a summary of the three editions:
Team Edition – ($165 + $20 per rep) per month for Weekly IT Newsletter
Overview
John J. McLaughlin, IT News And Events Editor-In-Chief, has been producing IT newsletters for 21+ years. We curate news stories from many IT publications, selection 60 to 80 based on our experience and a set of rules (e.g. no politics) and share those articles with 30+ subscribers. We track which are the most clicked on and pick the to 20-25 to become articles in the core IT News Sections which are the basis of our IT newsletter service.
Core IT News Sections
The newsletter is built from core sections. Not every section has news articles every week.
Each specific edition includes a list of sections:
A vendor section is made from articles based on the vendor’s press releases and blog posts.
The vendor specific editions will have the appropriate vendor section(s). Through acquisitions, some will have more than one. E.g. the Dell Vendor Edition will have news sections for Dell, VMware, EMC, RSA etc.
Team editions can have their choice of vendor sections. E.g. a reseller team may sell IBM, Citrix and Microsoft products so they could include all three along with their choice of core sections
Subscribers will receive a weekly email from the email address of the sales rep who “owns” them. That will be the:
Sales rep who added them
Sales rep whose custom URL they used to subscribe/opt-in
Sales rep who owns team edition whose opt-in form they used (Team Edition)
Sales rep who they were transferred to by team member who owns the team edition
Each subscriber has a profile which they can modify. A link to manage that profile is included in every newsletter sent to them. That link will log them in to their profile automatically, therefore they should not share their newsletter. Similarly, a link to unsubscribe is also included in every newsletter.
Subscribers can opt-out of specific sections in their profile or by clicking on the “turn this section off” or “disable” links in the sections they don’t want.
The subscriber’s profile is used to deliver a tailored newsletter and web site experience. If a subscriber disables or opt-out of a specific section, then they will not see it.
Enterprise Team Edition – $165 + $20 per rep
$165 plus $20/month per rep, up to 2500 subscribers (active or inactive)
team features – Team news section, transfer subscribers, submit articles to Team news section
team or company website – <team>.it-news-and-events.info
DNS can be used to make site appear under team’s own domain. E.g. https://itnews.<team web site>
Option to add sections (e.g. vendor sections)
Option to remove specific sections (e.g.. “IT CRM”)
Newsletter and website banner includes rep’s picture, contact info and vendor logo
Web for for new subscribers to opt-on in and they will be assigned to team lead
Team members can transfer their subscribers to a different team member
weekly newsletter, sent automatically, from each rep’s email address to that rep’s contacts
Newsletter template may be customized
Enterprise Vendor Rep Edition – $90/month
Standard section plus a Vendor News section (e.g. Cisco, IBM, Red Hat, Citrix, Lenovo, Dell)
one rep
Web version will be <vendor>.it-news-and-events.info
up to 250 contacts – more can be purchased
Banner includes rep’s picture, contact info and vendor logo
Each rep will have a unique subscription URL so that new subscribers are assigned to them. i.e. new subscribers can self-register
weekly newsletter will sent automatically from rep’s email address to rep’s contacts
Can be upgraded to Enterprise Team Edition
Personal Rep Edition $30/month
one rep
Account under <first.last>.it-news-and-events.info
up to 250 contacts – more can be purchased
Standard sections only
Banner includes rep’s picture, contact info and the rep’s choice of logo
Each rep will have a unique subscription URL so that new subscribers are assigned to them. i.e. new subscribers can self-register
weekly newsletter, sent automatically from rep’s email address to rep’s contacts
Can be upgraded to Vendor Rep or Enterprise Team Edition
Business Card Scan, LinkedIn Verify and Import for Newsletter Opt-in
$1.50 per card imported – minimum batch size is 30
Cards may be scanned and sent by email as PDF pages
Cards can be sent via the main (USPS, UPS, FedEx etc.) to be scanned and imported
Spreadsheet will be used for import also sent to rep
IT Sales Professionals (“Reps”) generally understand the value of keeping their name and information in front of their customers, prospects and partners on a regular basis. Email newsletters are a great way to do that but there are challenges:
Finding content that will be of value to your contacts
Formatting that content each week in a tool like MailChimp or ConstantContact
Managing subscribers
Following these steps every week
Rather than doing all that work, we suggest that Reps use our IT Newsletter As A Service.
Buy vs. Build.
IT News and Events produces a weekly email newsletter for enterprise IT professionals. We curate about 80 items each week from a wide variety of professional IT publications (such as CIO, CSO Online, HelpNet Security, The Enterprisers Project, insideBIGDATA, SearchSecurity,…). We include those articles in a newsletter which is sent to our 30k+ subscribers.
We track which articles are clicked on and we pick the 20 to 25 most clicked on articles (“crowd selected”) to become the basis of our IT Newsletter as A Service.
The selected articles are placed into named sections. The newsletter is built from those core sections. Not every section has articles every week. Here is the current list of sections:
Subscribers will receive a weekly email from the email address of the sales rep who has them as a subscriber.
People can become subscribers of an individual Rep:
because the Rep added them through our web tool or
by filling in a registration form provided to them by the Rep
Each subscriber has a profile which they can modify. A link to manage that profile is included in every newsletter sent to them. That link will log them in to their profile automatically, therefore they should not share their newsletter. Similarly, a link to unsubscribe is also included in every newsletter.
Subscribers can opt-out of specific sections in their profile or by clicking on the “turn this section off” or “disable” links in the sections they don’t want.
The subscriber’s profile is used to deliver a tailored newsletter and web site experience. If a subscriber disables or opt-out of a specific section, then they will not see it.
The Personal Rep Edition includes:
delivery of weekly Enterprise IT Newsletter to Rep’s contacts
web tool for managing contacts
a unique URL with
web version of articles with links to source material
registration form
archives
profile management
per Rep banner with picture, logo and contact information for newsletter and website
up to 250 subscribers included (add $25 for 2500 more)
optional service to upload a spreadsheet of subscribers
optional service to scan business cards into a spreadsheet that can be uploaded
A couple of notes as it relates to our “IT Newsletter As A Service.”
“The people you send newsletters to can be divided into two categories: a) existing clients, and b) prospective clients…
Based on these goals, there are four types of emails you can send clients:…
The news digest email: This newsletter consists of news stories and “best of” reads. Your goal is to show readers what inspires you (and by proxy, how it impacts your work) and to keep them abreast of industry developments…”
IT News and Events (ITNE) offers services for a vendor that will:
Put news and information about the vendor in front of a large number of qualified people (Sponsored Section)
Provide the vendor, their sales teams and their resellers with an optional tool that they can use to educate and inform their contacts (Newsletter Service)
Sponsored Section
ITNE has been publishing a weekly Enterprise IT newsletter for 20+ years. Our main publication has 50k+ subscribers and has been focused on Enterprise IT since 2011.
That newsletter is composed of sections like CxO, Security, Networks, Big Data, Servers, Storage, Compliance, Backup. Each subscriber can disable section that they are not interested in. About 80 articles each week.
Each week, we track which articles are clicked on and we make a second newsletter with just the most popular, “crowd selected” articles. That newsletter (“ITNews”) has 20-25 articles each week, also in named sections that subscribers can enable/disable.
INE can create a custom newsletter from your named section and plus the “ITNews” sections. That’s what you see for the Citrix example.
A salesperson can be given an account from which they can add their contacts who will receive a weekly newsletter, automatically, from that sales person’s email address, with a masthead for that sales person (picture, logo, contact info.)
Most people selling or marketing into the enterprise IT space see the value in having a regular newsletter with valuable content sent to their key contacts. However, they know how hard it is to produce a quality newsletter that their contacts will value.
Each newsletter account costs $20 per month if you also have a sponsored section.
Reseller Newsletter Service
ITNE can also create a custom newsletter for your resellers. They will have a different publication url. They can choose which sections they make available to their customers.
We charge $200/month per reseller for that service. You can choose to provide that service to certain of your preferred partners at your cost or they can deal with ITNE directly.
can be filtered by each subscriber (e.g. people not interested in IoT or AI can disable those sections and get a shorter newsletter)
Once you are set up with an account, you will be able to add your contacts:
one at a time through our web based SAT tool
a group at a time by uploading a spreadsheet
by giving your contacts a unique URL to a subscription form
Here is a sample spreadsheet CSV. First row has the names of fields, second row has record for John Smith of Acme where he is an IT Manager:
company,first,last,title,phone,email,comment Acme,John,Smith,IT Manager,954 324 7867,john.smith@acme.com,This will not be seen by the subscriber. Could be a customer id
If you are like most IT sales professionals you will have:
LinkedIn contacts
you can download a spreadsheet from LinkedIn that has some information, but not the email, for each of your contacts
in a spreadsheet tool, you can delete the rows for those LinkedIn contacts that don’t make sense to add as newsletter subscribers
for the ones you want to add, you will have to look them up in LinkedIn to get their email address
note that the trend in LinkedIn for the last few years is for people to use personal email addresses rather than business
contacts (in your email client, CRM system or other tools) which can be exported into a spreadsheet
stacks of business cards
every sales rep I know has boxes of card from customers, partners, prospects etc.
sort through the one that make sense to add to your list
there are scanning/ocr products that will scan business cards into a spreadsheet
Go through those, removed unneeded columns, and determinate the people you want as key contacts and add them as your subscribers!
This effort will not only improve your visibility in the market, but it will set you up well for whatever new position you take!
